By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
From all outward appearances, William Wallace Keegan’s sentence in Phoenix last week was nothing out of the ordinary: a big time drug dealer getting hit with a life sentence after a long career in the drug trade.
But what made his case stand out was the evidence at trial in June which showed that the 62-year-old (aka Richard Alan King) of Harbor, Fla., had all 10 fingers surgically altered in the 1990s to obliterate his fingerprints above the first joint, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Despite his unusual effort, a DEA press release said an agency forensic print analyst was still able to “match the lower joint fingerprints” to confirm his true identity.
Evidence during trial also showed that Keegan, along with others, obtained cocaine in Arizona and transported most of it via the U.S. Postal Service to New York between November 2005 and January 2008.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton sentenced him to five concurrent life sentences for drug trafficking and 240 months for money laundering.
One thought on “Drug Trafficker Had Surgically Altered All 10 Fingers to Obliterate Prints”